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Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories

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Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories

#191

Post by minikites »

jhall1468 wrote: post #185
minikites wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We still live in a very racist society, how is that helped by pretending otherwise? http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873 > The results show significant discrimination against African-American names: White names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews. We also find that race affects the benefits of a better resume. > We find little evidence that our results are driven by employers inferring something other than r…

> We still live in a very racist society, how is that helped by pretending otherwise? No one is pretending anything. You are the one that brought race into this. And your evidence of the problem is to post studies that didn't even study the actual industry we are discussing? > These are two narrow examples of course This is the first relevant thing you've said. So narrow, they don't even touch on the subject at hand.

You think the tech industry is more egalitarian/meritocratic than employment in general? The study says:

> The amount of discrimination is uniform across occupations and industries.

If you have evidence that the tech industry is different, please post it, I would be interested to see it.

Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories

#192

Post by msoad »

thewarrior wrote: post #76
msoad wrote: post #72

I was rejected by Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Skype and many more companies. I got rejected by Apple 3 times and two times with Facebook and Google. I'm now working for Google. One thing I can tell for sure, specially after interviewing others. It's all random. Most of interviewers make their mind about the candidate in seconds. If you are a charming person you have a good cha…

May I message you ?

I prefer to stay anonymous. I'll share my recent interview experiences with Google, Apple and Facebook here soon.

Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories

#193

Post by neofrommatrix »

CrLf wrote: post #162
neofrommatrix wrote: post #61

I recently interviewed at very hot container startup. I had 1 phone screen, 6 on-sites, and 2 follow up phone calls. I did well in the phone screen to be invited onsite. Apparently, I did great on the 6 interviews onsite and then they wanted to have a follow up phone call with a manager (30 mins). That was positive too. But, the last phone call was set up with the SVP who determined that I was not a good "culture fit…

> 6 on-sites I don't understand the point of multiple (or very long) interviews. If they can't decide after the first 30 minutes if the candidate is hirarable, they probably won't. It's an illusion to think that interview environments relate directly to workplace performance. Interviews are mostly useful for the subjective parts than for grilling candidates in hopes of avoiding a bad hire. Going through all the hoops…

I agree. You cannot fake good nature and attitude during all day interviews. At least, I cannot. Soft skills and communication are really important in any team environment.

But, how would one go about determining whether someone is a quick learner? That beats me.

Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories

#194

Post by neofrommatrix »

pc86 wrote: post #161
neofrommatrix wrote: post #61

I recently interviewed at very hot container startup. I had 1 phone screen, 6 on-sites, and 2 follow up phone calls. I did well in the phone screen to be invited onsite. Apparently, I did great on the 6 interviews onsite and then they wanted to have a follow up phone call with a manager (30 mins). That was positive too. But, the last phone call was set up with the SVP who determined that I was not a good "culture fit…

Maybe you legitimately weren't a good fit? I'm not being facetious, but "the SVP was an idiot and made a terrible call despite all the evidence" is possible but not the most likely scenario. Maybe someone with exactly your skillset and experience was hired, hated it, and quit after 6 months. Maybe one of the other people you interviewed with mentioned an offhand comment you made and it soured the SVP's expectation. M…

Very possible. From the recruiter's rejection email, it seemed that the decision was really close. And you're right. Cannot really speculate about this.

Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories

#195

Post by will_pseudonym »

relkor wrote: post #140
will_pseudonym wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun thought experiment: all this information is publicly available, and we're okay with it as evidenced by the fact that we're participating freely in the activity. You're not bothered by algorithms (maybe you are, but you're not writing about it, so from this context you're less bothered) that can analyze data and language and patterns of communication, but you do have a problem with a human trying to understand the…

To be more formal, there are two possiblities that I see: 1) You are RecruiterBot born from the forge of a brillant engineer smarting from rejection and trained to communicate using audio samples from bugs placed in business schools. - The announced intent to harvest data is a flaw in the algorithm because it is known that humans find overt monitoring "creepy". My response is to submit a ticket to your maker using th…

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this! To give you some insight into my behavior--I have an intuition about who is naughty or nice (maybe I'm Santa!), and I don't spend any time on awful folks unless I'm learning from the experience. That means I can put more wood behind fewer arrows so to speak.

It absolutely seems creepy to read about my behavior, but I promise that with the people I reach out to, my batting average for them responding positively is probably around 0.600. I need to crunch those numbers--that'll be a neat piece of data to use to demonstrate that I'm effective at communicating with new people, which means my fat butt is worth it's weight in gold to companies who want to reach new clients and partners.

I think you might find that high touch sales is much more like what I've described above, than not. I love when someone treats me like I've described, because it demonstrates listening and understanding! Which is equivalent to them demonstrating that they respect me and my time.

I absolutely respect your space and won't stalk you (mostly because I don't think it'll be a mutually beneficial relationship). I would say though that if you met me on the street, you'd find that I radiate a positive aura and leave nearly every human interaction with both of us better off. I know what I'm doing is Right because of the evidence of the reactions in my life to what in putting out. And to quote the song Forrest Whitaker, "You ain't gotta love me!" :)

Have a great day, and best of luck to you!!

Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories

#196

Post by andrewstuart »

kafkaesq wrote: post #25
andrewstuart wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have no JavaScript these days then largely you can forget job hunting. If you have awesome, expert, deep, deep JavaScript then firstly you might as well be a unicorn but secondly, you will get a job.

If you have no JavaScript these days then largely you can forget job hunting. Not true. And weird, counterfactual statements like these are exactly why I don't like dealing with recruiters.

Sorry I should have qualified - it's true for all the jobs I search for. Other cities might still have jobs that are purely back end or pure games or something but here in Melbourne the jobs I see all have a web UI component.

Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories

#197

Post by will_pseudonym »

relkor wrote: post #140
will_pseudonym wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun thought experiment: all this information is publicly available, and we're okay with it as evidenced by the fact that we're participating freely in the activity. You're not bothered by algorithms (maybe you are, but you're not writing about it, so from this context you're less bothered) that can analyze data and language and patterns of communication, but you do have a problem with a human trying to understand the…

To be more formal, there are two possiblities that I see: 1) You are RecruiterBot born from the forge of a brillant engineer smarting from rejection and trained to communicate using audio samples from bugs placed in business schools. - The announced intent to harvest data is a flaw in the algorithm because it is known that humans find overt monitoring "creepy". My response is to submit a ticket to your maker using th…

Just some things I wanted to add: * loved learning about your threat/opportunity evaluation algorithm as it played out in evaluating me. I'm def gonna steal this when working with folks who are analytical like yourself! * the business school quip was quite entertaining. * your attitude of economic incentives not aligning, so that's why we shouldn't work together, meshes 100% with my beliefs and values. Not sure if that fits under the umbrella of irony, but...

Anyway, thanks again for the convo, you're a good person in my book!

Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories

#198

Post by joedavison »

tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #179
akavi wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? At my previous company (a relatively small startup, admittedly), one of the indisputably best engineers (a 10xer if I've ever worked with one) was hired after such a "second shot". A few weeks is probably too rapid a turn around, given that a "failed" interview is a negative signal (or at least, should be That's the point, after all). But say, a year later for engineers in that wide fuzzy area between "…

if you have competencies in areas A, B, C and apply for several positions and due to the vagaries of HR you get interviewed by team A which is not a good fit for some reason, why should you have to wait for a year to apply for teams B and C? This is like meeting a group of friends going on a first date with one of them, getting shot down and not being able to date any of the others for a whole year even if you could…

afaik, you can interview for a different team/function right away, no need to wait one year. The one year waiting period is for re-applying to the same position.

Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories

#200

Post by loup-vaillant »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #160
ido wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are often not allowed/better off not saying anything due to legal risks of letting slip something that could get your sued.

Really? Is that a real thing? (I'm a tech recruiter in Chicago) If I recruit someone good I don't expect them to nail the first interview. Sometimes they do and that's great but more often then not it takes some fine tuning. I'm not going to give up on them after one interview. Half of my job is helping developers with their soft skills. I see tons of guys who can do anything that's asked of them but they just cant i…

In my experience, you have to separate 2 very different situations:

-- When I ask why I didn't got the job directly, I never get an answer. It only happened to me once, over a couple dozen interviews (I failed their silly test: debugging flow charts on paper). Even the companies who were polite enough to tell me of the rejection over email never replied when I asked why.

-- When someone else asks on my behalf (an acquaintance of the company, a recruiter, or whoever tried to sell my services when I work for a consulting company), they always get meaningful feedback.

If you're looking for a job, and keep getting rejected, try to go through recruiters. I've heard that constant pestering over the phone also works, but I never dared.

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